Catastrophe for Starmer as Labour slump to joint all-time low in weekly YouGov poll, level with the Greens - the SNP have huge 18-point lead in Scottish subsample

YouGov have suddenly and belatedly started including Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain and Jeremy Corbyn's Your Party as options in their weekly GB-wide polls, which on the whole is a good thing because to some extent we've been flying blind about the impact of those two parties (especially Lowe's).  The curious thing is, though, that you'd expect a non-trivial vote share for Restore Britain to reduce Reform's vote share significantly, but in this poll Reform's vote share has actually increased.  A recent Find Out Now similarly found that including Restore made only a trivial difference to the Reform vote.  The only logical explanation I can think of is that most Restore supporters were previously selecting 'other party' when answering polls - which would indicate that they're quite committed in their choice of party, it's not just a casual preference affected by what they see in front of them in a menu of options.  

So on the whole you'd have to say this is good news for Farage, because it looks as if his support hasn't been exaggerated by recent polls in the way that had seemed a logical possibility.

(UPDATE: Having looked at the data tables more carefully, it appears that YouGov are only including Restore Britain and Your Party on a secondary menu which only appears if respondents choose "some other party", so that would explain why Reform's vote is unaffected.)

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 6th-7th April 2026):

Reform UK 24% (+1)

Conservatives 19% (-)

Greens 16% (-3)

Labour 16% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 13% (+1)

Restore Britain 4% (n/a)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Your Party 1% (n/a)

Scottish subsample: SNP 33%, Reform UK 15%, Labour 14%, Greens 11%, Conservatives 11%, Liberal Democrats 9%, Restore Britain 2%, Your Party 1%

In one sense a three-point drop makes this a very disappointing result for the Greens, but on the other hand what they probably care most about is where they stand in relation to Labour, and at the moment they're tied, which is good enough to be getting on with.  I constantly have to remind myself what Labour's record low vote share is (because it keeps changing), but I'm pretty certain 16% is the lowest they've ever been with YouGov, so this is a return to an all-time low.  No poll from any polling company during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership ever had Labour lower than 18%, so Starmer is unambiguously performing worse than his predecessor ever did.

The Iran war has (undeservedly) seen a partial recovery in Starmer's personal ratings, and some supplementary questions in polls have delivered a not too dreadful verdict on his response to the crisis.  Some have suggested that meant he and Labour were "having a good war", but it would be hard to argue that case now.

To reiterate the point that people always miss about YouGov's Scottish subsamples, they can be taken more seriously than subsamples from other firms because they're correctly structured and weighted.  However, they do still have a big margin of error due to the small sample size, so you will still sometimes get wildly misleading results, as happened a few weeks ago when there were two subsamples in a row showing the SNP below 30%.  This week's result is more routine, and is pretty encouraging on the whole - the unionist vote is split in an ideal way, and there's a substantial Green vote that the SNP will hope to squeeze on the constituency ballot next month, where in most cases the Greens are not standing candidates.

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My latest constituency profile for The National is Glasgow Baillieston & Shettleston - a seat I can claim a tenuous connection to, because my dad was once an assistant headmaster of the long since demolished St Gregory's secondary school in Cranhill.

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